Mike Hardisty Photography

Two years ago I was lucky to attend the Weston-super-Mare Carnival which you can read about here During the carnival I shot off a load of images of people taking part. The original background to this image was a part of a carnival float but it was just too distracting, so I cut him out and added him to a background of my own.

Does that dark background work?

To cut him out I used a great program called Topaz Re-Mask, post processing in Photoshop was basically blending the layers and adding a touch of NIK Glamour Glow, which helps with blending the two layers. As the area around his eyes was dark I also used a bit of the Photoshop Dodge tool just to highlite the eyes.

37 thoughts on “Weekly Photo Challenge: Colorful”

I think what helped to bring out the character was the low light. The carnival is on a winters night and the only light is from the thousands of light bulbs on the floats. It meant I could photograph without using flash…

The old background was very distracting and took away from that expressive face and colour of his outfit. I made the decision to mute the background by basically removing it and substituting something else.